Three dimensional (3D) sensing is useful in many domains and environments. It allows robots, autonomous vehicles, and remotely operated vehicles to safely navigate and traverse terrain, avoiding static obstacles like trees, structures, and drop offs and dynamic obstacles like people, animals, and vehicles. 3D sensing also enables mapping of a robot's local environment and larger scale mapping of larger surrounding areas. In industrial environments, three-dimensional sensors described here can create static or adaptive safety curtains around machinery and/or count or inspect parts moving through an automated assembly or manufacturing lines.
High update rate stereo data can be used to sense near-field obstacles, targets, or objects to be interacted with. If mounted as the “head” of a humanoid robot, a stereo camera can perform the exact same role as human eyes do—building a real time 3D representation of the area before the humanoid allowing for reactive grasping, path planning, step planning, object recognition, object tracking, and many other forms of 3D computation.